


We Faithless Few

by Guede



Category: Men's Football RPF
Genre: Aging, Arsenal FC, FC Barcelona, Friendship/Love, Interracial Relationship, M/M, Melancholy, POV Character of Color, Reunions, Separations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-02
Updated: 2020-11-02
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:35:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27185992
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Guede/pseuds/Guede
Summary: A question in the spirit of Langston Hughes: what happens to love deferred?  Does it waste away, or explode?  Or does it wait patiently, to be discovered once again?
Relationships: Thierry Henry/Robert Pires
Kudos: 1





	We Faithless Few

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written and posted to LiveJournal in 2007.

“The most faithful mirror is an old friend.”  
\-- _Spanish proverb_

* * *

He heard about it soon enough, what Arsène had finally gone and said about why he hadn’t been able to wait. The press here always brings things like that up, making sure that Thierry’s found out about it even if somehow, through the gauntlet of buzzing car radios and TV sets baring their gleaming screens from countertops and store windows and sweaty cupped hands in the metro stations, he’d managed to miss it before. Then again, he tells himself that it’s no different from England, the way they hold up their burning white camera flashes and poise their pens like daggers over their notepads. He tells himself he hasn’t gone paranoid yet.

He’s not old enough, not angry enough, not burdened enough no matter what anybody thinks. He will admit that: Arsenal made everything so easy. Living on the green at Highbury, outstripping the opposition with that beautiful clockwork passing at his back like an extra hand pushing him forward, forward, always forward…it was easy. It was like breathing. It was like living.

“Well, I think Arsenal is doing better without me. You can just look at the results so far this year, if you can’t look at the side and see all that potential,” he tells the reporters, without bitterness. They want that, they’re hungry for it and it shines from their eyes, but he won’t give them the satisfaction. “I’m very impressed.”

And he is. He always was, back when Cesc had that hair flopping in his eyes, when Robin turned about too fast at every mention at his name, when all the boys were younger and really boys and snappish because wounds are so raw at that age, so open and red so every breeze feels like a knife. And still they trotted out there, their heads high, and he remembers smiling at them and thinking how someday he’d be the one shivering in the wind, grown old and sensitive, and they’d be the ones standing with their faces into it, relishing the burn.

“I’m still a fan. I will always love Arsenal,” Thierry says, and the reporters go away disappointed because that’s what they’re always like, no matter whether it’s England or Spain. They want the “human interest” but what they really mean by that is that they want the rage, the grief, the gnashing of teeth at every little wrong and slight. They’re made too small by the magic that happens on the pitch, Thierry sometimes thinks, and so they need to know that the limits of transcendence are those white chalk lines, that outside of those men are never gods but always petty.

But he won’t give them that. Because his mind and his life may have changed, but his love is indeed constant. Because he does succumb to his flaws but he tries always not to live among them, because he not only knows but believes in the way that man can rise above the hatred and pain of the abuses of life, because he may lie (or make a truth a lie later) but he will never be comfortable with the lying, as some are. As some seem to think is better, is easier. Though it is not: lying is a false friend and falser comfort, and Thierry knows this from the brutal white light in the physio’s office, from the overriding aches keeping him company in the otherwise empty bed, and above all from the sight of the ball sliding so far away from where he wants it to go and the gaping empty goal staying there, holding the ugly truth up to his face.

Because he means it, when he says he’s sorry and he still wants Arsenal to do well, he still wishes his old teammates all the best. He tells the truth then, though they the reporters never want to realize it, and then does more for them because not only are his words the truth but they’re also the shreds that used to house his heart, held up raw and scarlet for the whole world to see. He loves Arsenal. He _lived_ there, with all of himself, and here, now, before them all, he’s not afraid to testify to this great love of his, to show them how it spread within him by showing them how its absence has cut away so much from him.

And it’s later, when he’s on his own in his new place with its hollow echoes interspersed with the strange new cadences of the Spanish streets outside, that he looks at his legs, at his feet and he acknowledges the other truth. That he is bitter, that he is disappointed, that he does watch Cesc and Robin and Mathieu and all the rest and sometimes he frames the TV in his hands, his fingers so dull brown and them crackling with red and white and green, and wants somebody to tell him _why_. Why last year, why not a little longer, why not till he could have had this too, this one more year at his heart’s place. Why couldn’t he wait, why couldn’t he _believe_?

He does not tell the reporters these things, and he never will. For his grief is his own, and so is his failure.

* * *

“Spain’s been good to you,” Thierry tells Bobby over the phone. “You scored right away.”

Bobby’s playing with his little daughter in the background, her happy burbles filling in the awkward silence. They’ve never stopped calling each other, but Bobby never asked about Thierry leaving for Barcelona, only about when Thierry would come and where was he living and all the little side-stepping details. He knows what being sidelined with an injury is like, he knows how the frustration mounts, he knows what it’s like to sit down and look at things and have to face up to the fact that they’ve changed and cannot be changed back. So he doesn’t ask. *You and Messi seem to be getting along,* he says instead. *And what about all those other young ones? Have you landed in another pack of prodigies?*

Thierry closes his eyes. “They make me feel old.” He opens his eyes, and looks at the computer screen with the white font on red background. He’d had to check, even though he knew the moment he was told that it wasn’t a misquote or an outright lie: it sounded exactly like Arsène, after all. No beating around the bush, even with the sadness. “But I hear Spain’s good for the old.”

*You’re still four years younger than me, even if you’re here only one year later. And I’m not ancient yet.* Bobby clucks his tongue and Thierry opens his mouth, but then comes the high giggle of Naia and Bobby’s low laugh.

There’s music filtering in from the next room, where Thierry’s letting a CD run, and there’s the occasional rumble of traffic from outside. Neither is enough, and for a moment Thierry thinks about turning on the music player on the computer and setting it to play something loud and fast and aggressive. “I’m going out for dinner now,” he lies. “I’ll call you later.”

* * *

He misses his baby girl, his Téa. He’s not sure when it went wrong with him and Claire but he can’t pretend that it wasn’t involved with the way he couldn’t feel the pains in his body and still think that it was all worth it, with the way he would look at the Arsenal crest everywhere and then not feel whole. Injuries are so hard in that way—they give people too much time on their hands and then press on them sores and doubts and worries for their closest company, and no matter who else is in the room. They make people think on them, think that maybe this time it won’t be the same coming back, maybe this time it’ll be the last time. Or maybe, just maybe, that last time was the last time and this time is when he sits in the dark and understands that he’s no longer the man he was.

There was a lot that happened, but Thierry remembers most the time he looked at Claire’s shoulder sloping beneath the blankets and suddenly he was furious that she could sleep so well.

There was a lot that happened, but Thierry remembers most the time he looked at the boys trying to console each other after a hard loss, their heads starting to go back up even though the tears were still threatening, and suddenly he was furious that they could trust so easily in the future to make everything right.

He had to leave, that was clear. He wanted to stay, he would’ve loved to stay, but Arsène had it right when he said Thierry had lost faith and so Arsène, to be honest, didn’t fight very hard to change Thierry’s mind. The man’s always known men and especially Thierry and he knows when the light goes out, when it would be pointless to change the mind because that doesn’t do a damn thing for the change in spirit. Of course Thierry wishes that he could’ve had it differently, or that at least he could’ve done it differently, with his wife and his daughter and without this feeling of biting disappointment in his gut, but he understood things when he understood them and now he can’t look back and say, he should have seen this earlier, talked about it earlier, done this earlier.

He was in love, after all. And even when love is dying, people never see it—not because it was so beautiful but because it made things so easy, because it came so easily that eventually it faded into the background and one didn’t have to look to know it was there. Until finally he was forced to look, and saw that it no longer was, and then—and then he is not that old, and not that broken, and he cannot simply sit in one place and dwell on his losses. He still has his hunger and his passion—things wouldn’t hurt so much if he’d lost that, too—and he has to move on.

Besides, it’s not a lie that his love still exists, even if it no longer is bound to him but has gone away somewhere beyond his reach, somewhere back in the bright effortless memories where it’ll shine forever and make him remember how once its hot glow wrapped him within it. He still sees the shadows and sometimes he still glimpses something of its light, and so he still does cherish it. He didn’t want to tarnish it. He didn’t want to be one of those old men, those selfish curmudgeons with the urge to gnaw away at everything around them that reminds them of what they can no longer do, those bitter fools who confuse loyalty with blind resentment.

Arsenal is whole, Thierry thinks. Even if he is not, and sometimes that is enough for him. But sometimes it isn’t, and he wishes he were a worse person.

* * *

Bobby sends Thierry one of those _‘your friend so-and-so thought this article was interesting and wanted you to see it’_ email notices, with a link going not to what Arsène said about Thierry but what Thierry said about Arsenal. An older article, back when everyone still was asking not if Thierry could make it at Barcelona but if Thierry wanted to make it at Barcelona. If maybe spite might do it, ease the transfer for him, as if he’s ever played better when he’s been unhappy. Do they not remember him at Juventus? Do they not remember those last grimaces at Arsenal, the slumped-shoulder stalk about the Emirates Stadium?

For a long time, Thierry looks at the email. There’s no attached note even though Thierry knows people can add those to articles from this paper, even though Bobby’s done that in the past. But there doesn’t need to be one—Thierry’s known Bobby long enough to know why no personal note is there.

He doesn’t do anything; the email sits in his inbox and within a day is multiple pages back. If he didn’t think on it, he’d never know that it was there. But it’s Bobby, and Bobby probably is sitting at his computer looking at the lack of emails from Thierry while knowing exactly why that is.

In Thierry’s next press conference nobody’s talking about Arsenal for once. Instead it’s all about all the terrible misses he had during the match—‘almost goals’ is the wrong way of looking at it, even to Thierry—and how he feels about them, and how frustrated he is, and if he’s still having problems with his old injuries. With adjusting to the Spanish style, with learning how to play with his teammates, with the Ronaldinho nonsense and the Samuel nonsense and whatever other sore the reporters care to pick at, save the Arsenal one. 

Later on he trawls online for the write-ups, and when he finds one that’s somewhat accurate he forwards it on to Bobby. No note either, though he started and erased one a few times. Then he checks the results for the Arsenal match, and he sends a few texts and emails, and then he sits on his couch and watches replays of his misses on the news. They’re bad—horrifically bad, and even worse is how everyone talks about how ‘unlucky’ each is, as if luck really had anything to do with it. If it did, he wouldn’t hate himself so much because there’s nothing he can do about luck, but there’s everything he can—he should—be able to do about himself.

* * *

He sees Cesc’s words about feeling too inhibited by his presence and he knows that Cesc doesn’t mean them the way the press wants to read them but he also knows that Cesc does mean them. And that Cesc’s right, too.

It’s nothing like that at Barcelona. Leo and Xavi and Andrés all have learned to square their shoulders and bear the team upon them if the pace falters, if the older bigger names can’t keep up. They depend on themselves first so they don’t stare when a teammate needs to lean on them, and when they themselves begin to waver they simply spring ahead, running it off instead of dropping back so the big stars can lead. So here Thierry is famous, yes, but he’s famous as a Barcelona footballer and not famous _as_ Barcelona. Here Thierry can lead, if he actually can (and he wonders about this now), or he can lean and if he chooses the latter, he does not have to worry about leaning too hard.

They lean on each other back at Arsenal, and now that Thierry is away he can see that the leaning is all inwards, towards each other, like a proper team. And now that Thierry is away, he can see that when he was there, the leaning was all towards him but he didn’t lean back, and at first that was because he never thought about it, he was so busy running forward—he knew they were behind him and his only worry was that they’d keep up with him, not about what’d happen if he himself fell behind. Then it was because he didn’t know if they could take his weight, he didn’t know if they could run forward as far and fast as he could and he didn’t want to lose them.

He’s a selfish, arrogant man sometimes. He knows this. He knows this and wrestles with it, and at the end of the day, he can step above it and look at Arsenal without him and say, without rancor, that they are the better there for leaning in a circle and not in a line. He can say, he was wrong when he didn’t trust in their strength. And he can say, as he swallows his pride and leans heavily on his new team and feels it sting as none of them look badly upon him for it because _that is not the way here_ , that he was too weak in the end to trust in his own strength.

He’s not as good as he should be, he’s not as good as his Arsenal teammates thought he was, as his heart urges him to be. He’s not old but he’s older and he’s lost the chance to lead before he finally learned how it should be done. So he learns, now, how to follow and wait on others, and sometimes he chokes on the lesson.

* * *

Bobby’s on the doorstep, his hair wisping in his eyes and a lumpy bag over his shoulder. His arm goes round Thierry’s shoulders as easily as it ever did, and his mouth brushes across Thierry’s cheek nearly to Thierry’s ear in greeting.

“What are you doing here?” Thierry asks.

“Come on out. What are you doing, anything? Okay, let’s go,” Bobby says. He has Thierry out the door before Thierry can grab his keys, and then it’s a scramble to get back inside before the door locks Thierry out.

Then he and Bobby are tripping down the stairs instead of taking the elevator, even though that’s a long way, and Bobby needs the whole time to tell Thierry some story about the trip here. It’s hilarious, in that droll understated way of Bobby’s, but at the end Thierry still has to ask why is Bobby across the country in Barcelona, and does—

“I was hoping I wouldn’t need to get a hotel room.” Bobby looks up then, his hand on the lever for the exit door and his face solemn in the dim light. He takes his hand away and leans against the door so it opens a sliver, letting a thin white line trace its shaky way down the side of his face and throat and body, and his fingers press at the hair over his temple. “It’s been a while, and I thought if I didn’t visit you now, I’d never get into the habit again.”

Thierry smiles, and brushes the strands away from Bobby’s eyes. He takes away his hand but leaves it up in the air because he knows that the locks will sweep back, as they indeed do, and then he pushes them away more slowly. “My couch is always open.”

They both know that joke, wealthy as they are with all life’s refinements at their feet, and still both of them will go to the couch first if their host doesn’t offer them something else. But the joke doesn’t really answer the question, not to Thierry’s satisfaction. He starts to ask again, but Bobby is already through the door, so instead Thierry puts out his hand and stops the door mid-swing, and then steps out himself.

It’s early evening and the sky is striped with yellows as vivid as that—awful, Thierry privately thinks—Villareal home kit. Not red yet, he also thinks, and for a moment the gladness and ache all jumble up in his head.

“I think you looked better in red and white, too,” Bobby suddenly says. His voice is soft and toneless, but when Thierry looks sharply at him, his eyes are as dark and weathered and calmly, gently knowing as ever. He has his passions, his temper and his occasional fury, but he’s always been a little more restrained, a little more selective with their deployment than Thierry. “I told her you looked angry lately. She agreed. And you hung up on my daughter.”

“I didn’t…” But Thierry thinks a moment and then smiles at his feet, wry and stinging. Maybe Bobby’s making it up, or maybe Thierry was listening even worse than he remembers, but at any rate, it doesn’t matter which. The meaning’s the same. “Well, I’m sorry if I did. Samuel brought his son the other day—he’s going to be a star in just a few years.”

A breeze whips down the back of the building, swirling up enough dust for its grit to be felt against Thierry’s lips. Bobby narrows his eyes against it, steps back and slings his arm over Thierry’s shoulders again. His bag presses hard between them, its contents nudging Thierry with a familiar round curve. “You’ve got a few stars with you who still aren’t shaving yet.”

“I know.” Thierry looks at the sky, shifts back his shoulders. He feels Bobby’s arm shift with them and he wants to close his eyes and pretend to smell grass, oily fish and chips. But instead he snorts and ducks his head to rub at his nose, then at the back of his neck. “I know, I know, I know—it’s a lot like it, isn’t it? It’s why there are only two clubs ever that I’ll—”

“If you say ‘love,’ I’ll hit you.” And Bobby means it. He’s not Vieira, not Zizou or even Ribéry, but when he gives his word he keeps it, through rage or sadness or anything else. “It’s not the same, Titi. It’s what it is, and Arsenal’s what it is, and your leaving is what it is.”

“I _know_. I—I _had_ to go. I had to leave, all right? I couldn’t stay. It wasn’t—” And Thierry fumbles for the words even though they’ve kept him such close company, even though they’ve fought to be free and vicious and bitter so many times before the cameras. Even though finally, this is not a reporter but Bobby, who understands and who is even one year ahead in Spain so maybe he—maybe he—knows—something. “ _Bobby_.”

The other man glances at him, then turns and as Bobby turns, his arm slips from Thierry’s shoulder. One fingertip ghosts lightly down Thierry’s spine before the solid warmth of the man’s palm is laying over the small of Thierry’s back, and then also against the side of Thierry’s face. Bobby presses his forehead to Thierry’s, his hair tickling Thierry’s cheeks as he breathes slowly, so slowly, and even though this close Thierry’s visions blurs—maybe it blurs anyway—he can still make out the lean planes of the other man’s face, bitten in from their youthful smoothness but still beautiful, still graceful.

“I had to leave,” Thierry says a last time. His voice cracks, not able to hold all that belongs in those words, all that finally comes through to fly far, far away, up into the now-red sky where he can no longer reach them. “I’m sorry.”

And Bobby says, “I know, but you’ll get used to it. It’s possible.”

Thierry rasps a breath, blinking quickly. His hands are pulling at Bobby’s shirt and he doesn’t remember putting them there but he keeps pulling, twisting till Bobby takes his hand and puts it on Thierry’s wrist. Then he reaches back and something bulges out from Bobby’s side before dropping between them, bouncing hard on Thierry’s foot. Then it rolls off so Thierry can see the spherical whiteness of it, and for a moment Thierry doesn’t believe it. He doesn’t _get_ it, what it has to do with all this red longing that eats away at him.

And then he does, but he still can’t believe it. He looks up at Bobby and their noses bump; Thierry moves them apart and looks again, and Bobby looks solemnly back, as if this is not even more ridiculous than the idea that Thierry can still, somehow, move about without his heart—and Thierry laughs.

“I know,” Bobby says, and brings out his wry smile. He steps back to swivel and poke at the ball with his foot. “I know, but we always talked better with our feet anyway.”

Thierry’s smile fades a little. “I don’t talk so well these days. I think you’ve seen. I--” he feels his eyebrows rise, his shoulders sink “—I think I’m getting too old.”

Bobby stares at the ball, his brow creased and the corners of his mouth turned down. He places his foot on top, then tries to flick it under and pick up the ball on his toes. But the ground in this alley is uneven, rough slowing pavement where the dust hasn’t filled in the dents, and so he stumbles. His hand goes out and Thierry instinctively takes it, and they both watch the ball carom off the wall to roll tauntingly past Bobby.

For a moment Thierry wants to kill it, to do away with it and every black thing that’s come to nestle within its scuffed whiteness. But while he’s thinking that, Bobby stretches out his leg and pulls the ball back to him. And he tries again, and stumbles again, and this time the ball comes to Thierry.

“Maybe you are getting old,” Bobby says, looking at the ball. “Maybe the boss is right, but look, that doesn’t mean everything’s gone.”

“I had to go, Bobby.” Thierry steps back from the ball. “I couldn’t believe anymore. And if I don’t think it can happen—it can be done—then what is there?”

Bobby laughs, surprisingly enough. It’s slightly sour and turns brassier as it echoes about the alley, but he moves forward fluidly enough to tip the ball back towards him. He has to move back a little to balance properly on his other foot, and then he starts to position himself again. “Titi, it hurts when you’re old. That’s how it is. When you’re young that’s not what you believe in—you never think you can get hurt, you believe that it’ll be there and you just worry about how long till you get to it.” He frowns. “These are lousy shoes. I don’t think I can do—”

And his foot moves, and the ball flicks up and then down, and for that one moment it graces his toes like a huge pearl. Thierry blinks, then looks quickly at Bobby’s face and Bobby’s genuinely surprised. So surprised, in fact, that he wobbles and the ball falls off, then skitters down the alley.

“So I did do it. One more time,” Bobby says musingly, watching it roll. “I was hoping—that’s who hope’s really for, you know. It’s for when you’re old, when you worry about whether it’ll ever happen again. You know it’s going to end and you get up every day knowing that some day it’ll be that day. And then you go out and you try it, hoping to God it isn’t today. Because what else can you do?”

The ball slides to the end and touches the wall before uncertainly, stutteringly making its way back towards them. It’s moving at barely a snail’s pace when Thierry steps up behind Bobby and lays his arm across the back of Bobby’s shoulders, rests his chin on top of that. They watch the ball, Thierry thinking it can’t possibly make it the whole way but still stubbornly looking on till it finally grazes the tip of Bobby’s foot.

“I wasn’t apologizing to you.” Thierry’s breath stirs the ends of Bobby’s hair, pushing them up so he can smell past the staleness of travel on the other man to the sweat and skin.

Bobby turns his head, his temple touching the top of Thierry’s head. “I know, and I don’t think the boss will sign me again. But it felt a lot better to say it.”

“You don’t?” Thierry asks, frowning.

There’s a shrug, and then Bobby lifts his foot to roll the ball between his ankles. “No, but sometimes I think maybe I’m hopeful. He loves it too—and he loved it when we were there, even though he still loves it now that we’re gone.”

“I’d never ask…” Except Thierry thinks he _has_ , somewhere in that huge black blister that’d swollen within him. Never mind that that blister’s drained clear now, without that bitter explosion he’s been fearing: it was there and he cannot but face its hollow now. Face it and think that it won’t be filled, no matter what he does.

The ball nudges at his foot. Thierry breathes in deeply and slides his arms further down Bobby, clasping his hands over the man’s chest, and looks forward. There’s a garbage can lying on its side at the end of the alley, angled away from them with its mouth towards the end wall.

Thierry pushes down on Bobby’s shoulders and swings his leg. His foot touches neither of Bobby’s ankles but instead hits the ball solidly and it whips forward, then rockets off the right wall, the end wall—goes clanging into the trashcan.

It’s an alley, he thinks. With no space, with no quick tough defenders and determined goalie in the way. It’s not the same, just like Barcelona isn’t the same. But he smiles into Bobby’s shoulder anyway, because it still does make him happy. And he can’t help trying to be happy, even if he knows it’ll never be the same and he’ll think about all the time—but if he did nothing, he’d have nothing. At least he can have this, he thinks, his arms around Bobby and the winey and blue Spanish dusk over his head and the white ball still rattling away ahead of them. For as long as he can hold onto it, and if now he knows that someday he _will_ lose it, perhaps that’s for the better. He’ll learn to hold onto it, and never again simply believe that it’ll be there behind him.

“I missed you,” he whispers, his mouth sliding against the back of Bobby’s neck. “I know I wasn’t there then, like you are now.”

Bobby’s head bows. Then it rises, and his hands rise as he turns within Thierry’s arms, as he presses his mouth to Thierry’s brow, upper lip, mouth. “I know,” he says. His eyes glitter for a moment, hardened and sharp, before they soften to what Thierry remembers. “And sometimes I was mad, but I was still hopeful, too.”

Thierry kisses him, and knows then that even when the faith is gone, the love does stay. In some way, in some form, and so he can always try again. He will always try again.

**Author's Note:**

> Set somewhere in September 2007. Assumes that Thierry Henry didn’t had time to buy a house and thus was still in whatever apartment in which Barcelona put him up.


End file.
